04 June 2003

Wow! The Salam Pax phenomenon just gets better and better. Two things today: 1. On Salam's own blog is a link to a story by a western journalist in Iraq who was told to find him and interview him, only to discover that he had been employing the famous Baghdad Blogger as his interpreter and hadn't even known it! From Slate's Peter Maass. Sorry, but I have to do another long quote here.

My inner journalist tells me to draw back at this moment and write about the larger significance of my encounter with Salam Pax. That working alongside—no, employing—a star of the World Wide Web and being blissfully unaware of it is a lesson about the murkiness of today's Iraq, a netherland of obscurity in which you cannot know who was a Baathist and who was not, or whether the man in the middle of the street with a gun is going to shoot you or not, or whether the country is spiraling out of control or just having teething problems before becoming a normal nation. My inner blogger, however, tells me to skip the What This Means stuff and write about my life with Salam Pax.

2. Salam himself has just inaugurated a fortnightly (that's every two weeks for us ignorant Americans) column, which is, of course, excellent, and a little more substantial than some of the typical bloggy postings that you get irregularly. I look forward already to the next one. It's on the Guardian, of course. Here is the link to the first one.